Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Peszynska, Malgorzata
• Trykozko, Anna
• Iltis, Gabriel
• Schlueter, Steffen
• Wildenschild, Dorthe

Titel

Biofilm growth in porous media: Experiments, computational modeling at the porescale, and upscaling

Ist Teil von

• Advances in water resources, 2016-09, Vol.95 (C), p.288-301

Ort / Verlag

United Kingdom: Elsevier Ltd

Erscheinungsjahr

2016

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Elsevier ScienceDirect Journals Complete

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• •We use 3D imaging with a barium-based contrasting agent to obtain porescale geometries filled with biofilm.•We simulate the flow in the porescale geometries with and without biofilm, and upscale the results to the conductivities which compare well with the experimental values.•We show the dependence of the degree of bioclogging on the flow rates.•We simulate biomass growth and transport coupled to the flow and obtain morphologies similar to those in the experiment.•We show several reduced models for conductivities and their dependence on the biofilm growth. Biofilm growth changes many physical properties of porous media such as porosity, permeability and mass transport parameters. The growth depends on various environmental conditions, and in particular, on flow rates. Modeling the evolution of such properties is difficult both at the porescale where the phase morphology can be distinguished, as well as during upscaling to the corescale effective properties. Experimental data on biofilm growth is also limited because its collection can interfere with the growth, while imaging itself presents challenges. In this paper we combine insight from imaging, experiments, and numerical simulations and visualization. The experimental dataset is based on glass beads domain inoculated by biomass which is subjected to various flow conditions promoting the growth of biomass and the appearance of a biofilm phase. The domain is imaged and the imaging data is used directly by a computational model for flow and transport. The results of the computational flow model are upscaled to produce conductivities which compare well with the experimentally obtained hydraulic properties of the medium. The flow model is also coupled to a newly developed biomass–nutrient growth model, and the model reproduces morphologies qualitatively similar to those observed in the experiment.